Viewers

What is IIIF?

The International Image Interoperability Framework is a set of technology standards intended to make it easier for researchers, students and the public at large to view, manipulate, compare and annotate digital images on the web. It has been adopted, or is in the process of being adopted, by many of the world's great cultural institutions who have been systematically digitizing their collections for years. You can see a partial list of institutions adopting IIIF here.

The goal of IIIF is to make it simple to find images, open them in the web platform of your choice, and easily manipulate them, analyze them and compare them to images from other institutions.

When you see the IIIF logo in a search result or record for an image, you know that it is available to use with IIIF-compatible viewers.

What is a IIIF viewer?

When you visit the websites of a digital library, museum or online archive you will often be able to zoom and pan around high resolution images, change their appearance and navigate complex objects like scanned books. The technology in the browser that gives you this ability is what we refer to as an image viewer. The user experience of these viewers varies from site to site, offering you different controls and features. Typically these viewers are set up to only view images from one institution.

A IIIF viewer not only fully supports the IIIF open standard, but is also capable of rendering images from any institution that also supports the standard. For example, the same viewer on a Stanford website can not only open Stanford-hosted images, but also images available on Digital Bodleian.

What are the different IIIF viewers?

Mirador is a IIIF Viewer that was initially developed at Stanford and is now being extended in collaboration with Harvard, the National Gallery of Art and several other institutions from around the world. Mirador is unique in that it allows the user to open multiple images in the same workspace to compare side-by-side and even draw annotations to highlight and describe regions of the image. Try Mirador here.

How do I view an image in a IIIF viewer?

Play the video at the top of this page to learn how to drag and drop the IIIF icon into Mirador, and then compare it to an image from the Digital Bodleian using the same drag and drop action.